Episode 114: Debunking Fitness Myths: Expert Walking, Running, and Rucking Tips with Zach Lloyd
Jun 13, 2024
Stephanie L. Jones, Giving Gal
Get ready to debunk some fitness myths and learn effective exercise strategies with our special guest, Zach Lloyd, a Sustainable Anti-Diet Coach. Have you ever wondered why walking with small weights seems ineffective? Zach explains how minimal weights like one-pound dumbbells quickly become part of your body weight, losing their effectiveness. We'll also break down the benefits and risks of rucking, a weight-bearing exercise that can significantly ramp up your calorie burn and endurance. But moderation is key—Zach will guide you on avoiding overloading your joints and tissues. And if you’ve ever struggled with carrying heavy loads during daily activities, we discuss innovative solutions like the "front pack" for better comfort and posture. This episode is packed with practical advice to optimize your fitness routine while keeping you injury-free and performing at your best. Don't miss out on these expert tips to give your best life!
Connect with Stephanie:
Get a free resource The 4G Method Journal here. Shop Stephanie's books here. Follow me on IG: @Giving_Gal or FB/GivingGal
Get ready to debunk some fitness myths and learn effective exercise strategies with our special guest, Zach Lloyd, a Sustainable Anti-Diet Coach. Have you ever wondered why walking with small weights seems ineffective? Zach explains how minimal weights like one-pound dumbbells quickly become part of your body weight, losing their effectiveness. We'll also break down the benefits and risks of rucking, a weight-bearing exercise that can significantly ramp up your calorie burn and endurance. But moderation is key—Zach will guide you on avoiding overloading your joints and tissues. And if you’ve ever struggled with carrying heavy loads during daily activities, we discuss innovative solutions like the "front pack" for better comfort and posture. This episode is packed with practical advice to optimize your fitness routine while keeping you injury-free and performing at your best. Don't miss out on these expert tips to give your best life!
Connect with Stephanie:
Get a free resource The 4G Method Journal here. Shop Stephanie's books here. Follow me on IG: @Giving_Gal or FB/GivingGal
Speaker 1:
Hey friends, it's Stephanie with the Giving your Best Life podcast, and my friend.
Speaker 2:
Zach Lloyd, Sustainable Anti-Diet Coach.
Speaker 1:
Wonderful, I've gotten better at that. So today we had an interesting discussion of things that you see people do on social media or in your neighborhood, wherever, and you're like we should talk about this, and then I asked you a question like oh, I do this, can I do that? You actually said yes. So, uh, do you want to launch into the topic?
Speaker 1:
of and and so remember folks. I just want to say is uh, I have Zach on here because a big part of giving your best life is making sure you're taking care of yourself. Like, how do you give to yourself and you're working out in your fitness, in your diet? Because I have learned going through a journey If you have your health, you have nothing.
Speaker 1:
You cannot serve and give to anyone you do not take care of your family. Well, whatever God's calling you to do, it is hard to do if you are not healthy, and so I just wanted to reset and say, like remind everybody why I have you on here. Also, as always, whatever we talk about doing is make sure you're healthy, consult your doctor. Yeah, whatever you have to do to feel good about it. So do you want to launch the topic?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I saw an article recently that just always makes me laugh because you see this every once in a while, and it was do weights while you're doing the Peloton or biking? Do they actually help? Is it making your workout better? Is kind of the terminology they used.
Speaker 1:
Right. And then you said even like you'll see so beyond if you're not doing it on the Peloton or you're not doing it on treadmill or whatever. You brought up another topic. Yeah, I can't help myself.
Speaker 2:
It's one of those things that I just feel like a jerk when I do it, but inside I die of laughter. When I'm driving through my neighborhood every once in a while I'll see and it's not just like older people, I've seen younger people do this, where they'll have like a one pound in both hands, yeah, and they're walking with it and again, it's just their. The information is clearly not out there, apparently, because this is still a thing. I I mean, I didn't even know it was a thing until I saw something in my neighborhood doing it. I thought it would like die. I thought we knew better by now, but we don't.
Speaker 2:
So ultimately, the quick and simple of it is, you know, a couple pounds in your hands is not going to be enough to change your movement to a great degree where it becomes actually more challenging. And some of you might say, well, I get one pounds like it'll be more challenging, the, the stimulus and the like. Your feelings about the weight? I'm not saying that's not real, that is real. But it is so easy to progress and make one pound weights easy that you do it a couple times in one week. If that, depending on who you are, then the progression is over with and it's just part of your body weight at that point, right, um, and there's, so would you have to like if you did that?
Speaker 2:
yeah.
Speaker 1:
Is is like quickly move up in your weight and be getting to a much heavier weight for you to see an actual benefit of walking around with weights or whatever.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and that's so. That's where it gets tricky and that's the huge downside. So if somebody's like, okay, zach, well, I'm going to get 25 pounds on both hands and then I'm going to walk with them, right, well, okay, yes, but at some point you realize, like walking, you're not going to walk like you're supposed to be walking, because you're basically doing curl after curl after curl. You're not going to curl 25 pounds a thousand times in one walk.
Speaker 2:
So, there's a limiting factor in that, and that's why it's kind of like I joke about it being silly, because at a certain point I wish to do like five pounds, maybe 10 pounds if you're crazy, ripped and strong, like it's over, there's no progression there. Maybe 10 pounds if you're crazy, ripped and strong, it's over, there's no progression there. So you might as well focus on walking or running really well and increasing that separately from strength training or using weights. That's a much better way to do things. And then that's where you brought up rucking, yeah, which?
Speaker 1:
before we get into that, I have a couple of questions. So when you talked about walking or running, really well, can you tell us what that looks like? Because I will see people out walking and I'm like I don't even know if that's a benefit Like they're going really slow. I see a lot of people now who are like out walking and they're, they're on their phones and they're paying attention.
Speaker 1:
Um, you know, obviously running is, I would say, a little bit better, and obviously there's you know harder on your body when you're running, but for walking, what is walking well Like, if you want to get that benefit of a 30 minute or you know whatever people recommend. What does that look like, or what should you be striving for?
Speaker 2:
So I will say it greatly depends on your body type. It greatly depends on your body type. So I'm going to give completely general advice here that we just know, through what we call the gait cycle, of how your foot interacts with the ground and ultimately how your body weight moves forward. So I put that out there generalization. But ultimately what you want to be doing is feeling your heel going into the base of your big toe as much as you can Versus a lot of people are going to be more biased one way or the other More on their toes, missing their heel a little bit, or way too much on their heel, missing their toes.
Speaker 2:
It's kind of like one of those biases. And then there's, like I said, general information. There's a lot of people in the middle. So what do you do there? So if you get that a little better, great. Ultimately you can't think about it very often. Or else you're not walking or running anymore, like you're just I don't know what you're doing, like you're focusing too much on it at that point, right. And then the second thing, which is I probably would put this up here as the best thing you can do for anybody, because no matter your body type it'll help out is get more of an arm swing, yeah, and so what that looks like is actually seeing kind of in the cross, uh cross section of your eye is actually seeing your hand a little bit get in front of you. Oh okay, and then if it's getting in front of you, it's getting back far enough, right, and so that would be for both hands.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and you're, it's gonna be a little awkward at first that's why it's so important, yeah, is because, over time, we lose the availability of movement that we all need to have to move well, and so what happens is, instead of that big arm swing that we see like kids having, we start getting a little closer, a little closer, a little closer. And then, all of a sudden, you start being a shoulder twister Right and you're barely even moving those arms and it's just like hand shoulder, hand shoulder.
Speaker 1:
Right, so that's probably the best thing. I never even thought about the arms.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
But if you see somebody that's interesting, Like if I see somebody walking like that, where they're, really I'm like they are a power walker. Yeah, but they are probably somebody who it is a better cardio workout as opposed to a leisurely walk where you're just kind of slowly walking out there, like that moves you a little faster. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that.
Speaker 2:
A power walker yes, that's like a very real visual I have, yeah, so I would say there's two types of people too, on again, on two ends of the spectrum here there's like the power walker, and then there's the passive, picking daisy walker. Yeah, okay, neither are right, okay. The power walker has too much tension going through their body and they're like making fists while they're walking, and so that leads to more compression over time, which means harder impact over time. Essentially, long story short, which doesn't lead to better movement. So if you're a power walker, keep walking fast, but walk fast enough where you don't have to fight somebody with your fists while you're walking. So that would be actually like a better way to power walk, if you will. And then the picking Daisy person again, it's more arm swing, getting that arm in front of you, but loosely and gently, and seeing it a little bit out of that corner your eye.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so movement is what we want yeah, so many people are not moving today. You.
Speaker 1:
You're sitting in your office. You're sitting in your home. You're sitting watching TV, is it true? And I think I've actually read a study Now they're comparing sitting to smoking.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, or what are your thoughts there on that? Yeah, that's like a deep rabbit hole.
Speaker 1:
Okay, so we won't go down that. Okay, very good.
Speaker 2:
Long story short, though. Move like the study. There's a lot of studies on walking, running all stuff and sitting right. I think the the biggest like piece you can pull out of all of that, especially because we can't get a study that really shows, because you can't have somebody follow somebody else around all day and I think what we're really missing with movement is we want to turn it all into workouts, think less of workouts and think more of moving, and then the idea is the people that are moving more than others let's say more than average they're making different decisions in their life that I would say are at a threshold of more positive than negative, whether that means they're eating better or, um, because they are moving more, they ended up getting outside more and then they got more sunshine. There's all these side effects that are really hard to track, but ultimately, if, if you get above that threshold, I think that's when you really start to notice a difference and you're just general well-being yeah.
Speaker 1:
You bring up a good point because I've, you know, going from being very sick to hardly moving at all to now like I'm trying to get 150 minutes of movement a week, which averages five days a week, 30 minutes. But what it's done for me like having that number I have it like on my desk is like the other day I just looked out my window it was such a beautiful day and I was like go walk for 10 minutes. But to your point is, I wasn't in my basement on my treadmill, I was outside, the sun was shining down. I actually took a little bit to do like, took off my shoes and just stood in the grass, but then even doing like some grounding was I was just taking deep breaths.
Speaker 2:
You know. So it was like this I went out to walk to get moving, but there was multiple things that I did with it.
Speaker 1:
I came back in I felt so much more relaxed, like, oh, why haven't I been doing that more, like I could do that more.
Speaker 1:
So, anyways, I think that's a good point, switching gears a little bit. Going back to what we were talking on, the weights is what I asked, zach. So when I was really working out is I started rucking where I was wearing a vest with weights, um, started light and then when I felt like, oh, that's getting too light, I would add weights. So then I was like, was that even worth or is that different?
Speaker 2:
than one pound, two pound hand weights, yeah, so yeah, rucking basically just carrying any, any weight above your body weight with you can have some very positive effects. Uh, going back to movement, though, I think what's often missed, or mostly missed, especially in the rucking communities, whether it seems that it's like a little more military, because people have military vests and then they put weights in the military vest. You can rock with a backpack like right you don't have to do anything special I.
Speaker 2:
You can just get a nice little bag that goes around your back and whatever. So that's fine too. And the rucking kind of minimum threshold is usually about 10 to 20 pounds somewhere in there, depending on your body weight. So again, that's going to start to make a difference in how many calories you burn, because you're going to have to produce more energy to move that extra body weight. So that's the fact of the matter. And then what I would say I caution people with is at some point you're gonna hit a threshold where, just like we said about the power walkers, you're gonna have to tighten so much to carry like, let's say it's 40, 50 pounds, depending on the person that's like.
Speaker 1:
Really, I see the ripped and jacked people do this all the time, like I got 80 pounds and I did five miles, whatever, it is great.
Speaker 2:
And then they have the perception of being really fit. So you're like, well, rucking must be really good for you, and it's not that it's bad for you. But what we're missing is all that weight is going to change the way you walk and run right or hike or whatever you're doing with the weight, and your body's going to change the way it moves to move that extra weight that you're not supposed to have in your body, because you don't actually weigh that much right and so you will put excessive over time.
Speaker 2:
You will put excessive amounts of pressure and compression on your joints and tissues that you may not want to do now. If you're one of these super ripped and jacked people that's doing 50 and 60 pounds, you're you're kind of showing that you want to do that. That's fine. But I, if you're one of these super ripped and jacked people that's doing 50 and 60 pounds, you're kind of showing that you want to do that. That's fine. But I guarantee you you're going to move worse in a matter of a couple of years than you did before you started rucking. So me personally, I use rucking in the sense of I do it every once in a while, especially seasonally, and then I don't do it for a very long time, so it's a stimulus that's positive to my body, and then I stop doing it, so it doesn't change the way I move systemically Does that make sense.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I think rucking too could come into. Like I think of, we're going into the summer, I know that we're taking a big vacation, we're going to be hiking, we're going to have to be carrying those backpacks, and when I've done it in the past, I was thinking about like long hikes I was going to. Yeah, and that's something to think about. If you're going to national parks, you're doing some things like that. Summer is don't just expect to show up and go hiking with this extra weight on, like prepare, get your body used to carrying that backpack with some weight, yeah, so I think that your hike will be more enjoyable, probably decrease um injury that sort of thing but that's why.
Speaker 1:
So maybe there's even a specific reason why you're going to be doing it or you want to incorporate that into what you're doing.
Speaker 2:
And then the last bonus on that I would say too, is play around with where you carry the weight. A A lot of people have it in their like on a backpack behind them. It might be better for a lot of people to actually have that weight in front of you and higher up, and so like when I carry my kids around. I always do this I raise them up higher on my body and then I put them in front of me, depending on how heavy they are.
Speaker 2:
At some point you're going to have to put it on your back, and that's fine too. Don't feel like there's this legalistic rule about you have to have it on your back Play around with it and see how your body responds and how you feel.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you mean, you can wear a backpack on your front pack.
Speaker 2:
Yes.
Speaker 1:
A front pack.
Speaker 2:
Ooh, that's good.
Speaker 1:
We're coming up with something new here. We're all about breaking the rules around here on giving your best life. The rules around here on giving your best life. Well, I think that was a great topic, very educational. Also, too, is like just giving you things to think about how you're moving. What are you doing when you're moving? Things to start, things to stop, and this is just another example of a way that you can get to giving your best life.
